Roland Senn authored Feb 12, 2020 and Marge Bot committed Mar 02, 2020

If ImpredicativeTypes is not enabled, then `:print <term>` will fail if the
type of <term> has nested `forall`s or `=>`s.
This is because the GHCi debugger's internals will attempt to unify a
metavariable with the type of <term> and then display the result, but if the
type has nested `forall`s or `=>`s, then unification will fail.
As a result, `:print` will bail out and the unhelpful result will be
`<term> = (_t1::t1)` (where `t1` is a metavariable).

Beware: <term> can have nested `forall`s even if its definition doesn't use
RankNTypes! Here is an example from #14828:

  class Functor f where
    fmap :: (a -> b) -> f a -> f b

Somewhat surprisingly, `:print fmap` considers the type of fmap to have
nested foralls. This is because the GHCi debugger sees the type
`fmap :: forall f. Functor f => forall a b. (a -> b) -> f a -> f b`.
We could envision deeply instantiating this type to get the type
`forall f a b. Functor f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b`,
but this trick wouldn't work for higher-rank types.

Instead, we adopt a simpler fix: enable `ImpredicativeTypes` when using
`:print` and friends in the GHCi debugger. This is allows metavariables
to unify with types that have nested (or higher-rank) `forall`s/`=>`s,
which makes `:print fmap` display as
`fmap = (_t1::forall a b. Functor f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b)`, as expected.

Although ImpredicativeTypes is a somewhat unpredictable from a type inference
perspective, there is no danger in using it in the GHCi debugger, since all
of the terms that the GHCi debugger deals with have already been typechecked.